Oregon photographer Thomas Leander Moorhouse of Pendleton, Oregon, was a multifaceted man. Born in Marion County, Iowa, in 1850 he came with his family to Walla Walla, Washington, in 1861 in an ox-drawn wagon. He was a miner, surveyor, rancher, businessman, civic leader, Umatilla Indian agent, real-estate operator, insurance salesman, and assistant adjunct general of the Oregon State Militia, where he received the rank of major.

Moorhouse, like many Americans, took up photography in the 1880s after George Eastman made an easy-to-use film camera. Unlike most amateur photographers, however, he worked with glass-plate negatives, large cameras, and a tripod-the equipment of professional photographers. From 1888 to 1916, he produced over 10,000 images documenting Native American cultures and the urban and rural lives of his white contemporaries in eastern Oregon and Washington. So extensive and revealing are Moorhouse's images that his work constitutes one of the preeminent social history collections for life east of the Cascades during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

About one-third of Moorhouse's images are concerned with Native peoples, and they fall into two broad categories: studio portraits of tribal members, which he often made in the backyard of his home, and images of life on the Umatilla Reservation. During his lifetime, Moorhouse was most celebrated for his studio portraits. His portrait of the Cayuse Twins, for example, was reported to have sold over 150,000 copies. Many recent scholars find these studio images unsatisfactory because they are stiffly posed and Moorhouse supplied the clothing that the subjects wore and the implements they held from his extensive collection of Native American artifacts. He was capable, however, of taking pictures that documented the real life experiences of Native peoples. Some of his photographs taken on the Umatilla Reservation, for example, are reliable sources of information on Native clothing and dwellings, and they capture some of the social and cultural transformations that people there were experiencing.

Other photographs taken on the reservation and certainly the studio portraits have been strongly criticized recently because in them Moorhouse, like his acquaintance Edward S. Curtis, propagated the view that Indians were a vanishing race. One of his goals was to preserve on film the last shimmerings of Indian traditions before they passed into oblivion. This notion, as many have pointed out, presents a selective image of Native American life-one that extols and idealizes the past but fails to deal with present experiences. Both the portraits and the images from the reservation have recently been recognized as valuable for eliciting memories among tribal elders. Anthropologist Deward E. Walker persuasively has made the point that such memories have helped reveal important events that normally escape the attention of academic historians.

By far the largest group of photographs by Moorhouse shows scenes of daily life, both rural and urban, of his white contemporaries east of the Cascades. During his lifetime, the area around Pendleton was exploding economically and experiencing tremendous population gains. Moorhouse's photographs celebrate the prosperous development of the West and document ranchers, their homes, itinerant laborers, and their work in the fields. He produced thousands of images of small town and community life, including views of businesses, schools, churches, logging operations, and various forms of transportation. He was particularly interested in the social life and entertainments of his contemporaries, and he frequently photographed circuses, parades, and Wild West shows. Moorhouse also made over 600 images of the Pendleton Round-Up from 1910 to 1919.

Throughout his life, Moorhouse was careful to describe himself as an amateur for whom collecting Native American artifacts and photographing the world around him was a hobby . A close look at the full body of his work, however, makes plain that he had a keen eye and an intense interest in his world and a deep interest in history and in creating a historical record.

Moorhouse was a serious photographer, and he sent a message in every image. His photographs are poignant and revealing reports on an era, a region, and its peoples. Without his photographs, everyone's understanding of this important period in Oregon history would be diminished.

A reader makes the following suggestion: Since Moorhouse considered himself an amateur photographer, he always had some kind of day job. I would like to see discussion of aspects of his non-photography work, particularly those jobs that probably had a significant influence on his photography. Undoubtedly his tenure as Umatilla Indian Agent influenced his Native American photography. More on his time as Assistant Adjunct General in the Oregon State Militia would be appropriate as well -- obviously this was important to him since he retained the title of Major throughout his life. His work as a rancher, miner and surveyor likely had an influence on his photographs of urban and rural life in eastern Oregon and Washington.

James Fox
James Fox first served as a Special Collections Librarian at University of Oregon’s Knight Library from 1989 to 1993. After a seven-year stint at the University of Michigan, he returned to Eugene and since 2000 has been the Head of Special Collections and University Archives. Fox is responsible for acquiring and managing the papers and records of notable Oregon writers, politicians, and organizations and has also been heavily involved in the Northwest Digital Archives project and has served on the editorial boards of the Oregon State University Press, the Knight Library Press, and Wellsprings Friends School, an alternative high school in Eugene. He is an avid fly fisher who plies Oregon’s mountain and coastal streams at every opportunity.

Sources

Grafe, Steven L. Peoples of the Plateau, The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898–1915. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005

Sandweiss, Martha A. “Picturing Indians: Curtis in Context.� In The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001

Schmitt, Martin. “The Moorhouse Photographic Collection.� The Call Number 15:1: December 1953.

Walker, Deward E. “The Moorhouse Collection: A Window on Umatilla History.� In The First Oregonians, ed. Carolyn M. Buan and Richard Lewis. Portland: Oregon Council for the Humanities, 1991.